{183} Allen’s is a handsome, roomy, well finished stone house, for which, with twenty acres of cleared land, he pays a yearly rent of one hundred and ten dollars, to Andrew Ellison, near Manchester.[136] He himself is four years from Tanderagee, in the county Armagh, Ireland, from whence he came with his family to inherit some property left him by a brother who had resided in Washington, Kentucky, but two hundred acres of land adjoining my tract near Maysville, was all he had been able to obtain possession of, although his brother had been reputed wealthy. I have met many Europeans in the United States, who have experienced similar disappointments.
My equestrian companion finding that I did not walk fast enough for him, parted from me soon after we left Allen’s. At two miles from thence I came to Brush creek, a beautiful river about sixty yards wide. A new state road crosses the river here, but as I had been informed, that there was no house on it for ten miles, I preferred keeping up the bank of the river on the stage road, which led through a beautiful but narrow unsettled bottom, with Brush creek on the right, and a steep, craggy precipice on the left, for a mile and a half. I then ascended and descended a steep and barren ridge for a mile, when I forded the creek to Jacob Platter’s finely situated tavern and farm on the opposite bank.
Having rested and taken some refreshment, the growling of distant thunder warned me to hasten my journey, as I had five miles through the woods to the next habitation. The road was fine and level,—the gust approached with terrifick warning—one flash of lightning succeeding another in most rapid succession, so that the woods frequently appeared as in a flame, and several trees were struck in every direction around me, one being shattered within fifty paces on my right, while the thunder without intermission of an instant was heard in every variety of {184} sound, from the deafening burst, shaking the whole surrounding atmosphere to the long solemn cadence always interrupted by a new and more heavy peal before it had reached its pause. This elemental war would have been sublimely awful to me, had I been in an open country, but the frequent crash of the falling bolts on the surrounding trees, gave me such incessant warnings of danger, that the sublimity was lost in the awe. I had been accustomed to thunder storms in every climate, and I had heard the roar of sixty ships of the line in battle, but I never before was witness to so tremenduous an elemental uproar. I suppose the heaviest part of the electrick cloud was impelled upon the very spot I was passing.
I walked the five miles within an hour, but my speed did not avail me to escape a torrent of rain which fell during the last mile, so that long before I arrived at the hospitable dwelling of the Pennsylvania hunter who occupied the next cabin, I was drenched and soaked most completely. I might have sheltered myself from some of the storm under the lee side of a tree, had not the wind, which blew a hurricane, varied every instant—but independent of that, I preferred moving along the road to prevent a sudden chill; besides, every tree being a conductor, there is greater danger near the trunk of one, than in keeping in a road, however narrow, which has been marked by the trees having been cut down.
My host and his family had come here from the back part of Pennsylvania only last May, and he had already a fine field of corn and a good deal of hay. He had hitherto been more used to the chase than to farming, and he boasted much of his rifle. He recommended his Pennsylvania whiskey as an antidote against the effects of my ducking, and I took him at his word, though he was much surprised to see me use more of it externally than internally, which I did from experience that bathing the feet, hands and head {185} with spirituous liquor of any sort, has a much better effect in preventing chill and fever, either after being wet of after violent perspiration from exercise, than taking any quantity into the stomach, which on the contrary rarely fails to bring on, or to add to inflammatory symptoms.—A little internally however I have found to be a good aid to the external application.
I found at my friendly Pennsylvanian’s, a little old man named Lashley, who had taken shelter at the beginning of the gust, which being now over, he buckled on his knapsack, and we proceeded together. He had travelled on foot from Tennessee river, through a part of the state of Tennessee, quite across Kentucky, and so far in Ohio in nine days, at the rate of thirty-six miles a day. He had assisted in navigating a boat from Indian Wheeling, where he lived, to Tennessee, for which he had got thirty dollars, ten of which he had already expended on his journey so far back, though using the utmost economy. He remarked to me, that although he was upwards of sixty years of age, and apparently very poor, he had not got gratuitously a single meal of victuals in all that route. Are not hospitality and charity more nominal than real virtues?
The country for the next five miles is tolerably well improved, and there is a good brick house which is a tavern owned by one Wickerham at the first mile, and a mile further is Horn’s tavern, where the stage sleeps on its route to the N. E. towards Chilicothe.
Old Lashley complaining of fatigue, we stopped at Marshon’s farm house, ten miles from Brush creek, where finding that we could be accommodated for the night, we agreed to stay, and were regaled with boiled corn, wheaten griddle cake, butter and milk for supper, which our exercise through the day gave us good appetites for, but I did not enjoy my bed so {186} much as my supper, notwithstanding it was the second best in the house, for besides that it was not remarkable for its cleanliness, I was obliged to share it with my old companion; fatigue however soon reconciled me to it, and I slept as well as if I had lain on down between lawn sheets.
Marshon is from the Jerseys, he has a numerous family grown up, and is now building a large log house on which he means to keep a tavern. Three of his sons play the violin by ear—they had two shocking bad violins, one of which was of their own manufacture, on which they scraped away without mercy to entertain us, which I would most gladly have excused, though I attempted to seem pleased, and I believe succeeded in making them think I was so.
The land is here the worst I had seen since I had left the banks of the Ohio; it had been gradually worse from about two miles behind squire Leadham’s, and for the last two miles before we come to Marshon’s it had degenerated into natural prairies or savannas, with very little wood, and none deserving the name of timber, but well clothed with brush and low coarse vegetation.